I was recently afforded the opportunity to attend a NAV 2009 R2 Technical Deepdive session at Microsoft TVP. Whilst I had been exposed to many of the new features via many blogs from various people, it... (Continue reading)

So I'm sure everyone has already read the blogs previously posted by freddyk and waldo on the subject of consuming web services exposed by NAV, but as promised here is the continuation of my journey.... (Continue reading)

So it’s been more than a year since I posted last - Time does certainly fly when you are having fun. Thankfully my day job has been keeping me very busy, and this is never a bad thing. Interestingly though... (Continue reading)

Up to this point we have been preparing the structures needed to support our application. We have created the traditional simple tables and forms, as well as gone through the process of generating some... (Continue reading)

So last time we looked at a very simple transformation process for the few forms that we have created for the little Fuel Application ( look here ). This time we are going to do exactly the same thing... (Continue reading)

NAV 2009 Web Services (Part 3 – finally a web service!)

Up to this point we have been preparing the structures needed to support our application. We have created the traditional simple tables and forms, as well as gone through the process of generating some pages equivalent to those forms. The entire reason for the latter work was that it is only possible to expose pages or codeunits via web services.

Thankfully the task of registering and publishing a web service from within NAV is a very, very simple affair.

From within the Classic client navigate to, and run form 810 – Web Service.

Our first task is simply going to be to get a list of Vehicle records out of NAV. In order to do this we will need to expose our Vehicle List page (in my case this is page 50002).

To do this we simply select the Object Type = Page, enter the Object ID = 50002; give the service a name = Vehicle, and tick the published flag.

Next we need to make sure that the NAV Web Service service is actually running. This can be done by checking the services.msc for your machine.

So how do I make sure that something is actually being exposed before we look at consuming the web service (in the next post)? The answer is that we must verify our web service availability. We do this by navigating to the following URL in our web browser of choice:

Success!!!! The Vehicle page has been published and is exposing itself via the port specified.

Next time we actually get to something where I really am going to start to learn as I go – we will try to write an application in C# to retrieve our data via the web service. As I've mentioned a few times, and as the Microsoft Statement of Direction (see: http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/admin/archive/2009/05/21/what-is-the-plan-with-microsoft-dynamics-nav-until-2017.aspx ) mentions we are moving more and more towards using a .NET programming environment so I need to make sure that I am familiar with this environment as soon as possible. I see the current touch point as the web services so getting familiar with these and exploring exactly how to interact with and consume them is where my current focus is.

As a new NAV 2009 developer, I was reading your post with much interest. However, the bit that would have interested me most is the web service consumption as my intention is to expose the customer card page and use that via a web service.

Using part 3 of your very comprehensive guide, I've got it exposed very easily but I can't find part 4 anywhere. Has it been released yet?